CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — He does not have the name recognition of some other space entrepreneurs, people like Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin empire, or Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, or Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com billionaire.
That will probably change if things keep going his way. Elon Musk, a computer prodigy and serial entrepreneur whose ambitions include solving the world’s energy needs and colonizing the solar system, was the man of the hour — or of 3:44 a.m. Tuesday, Eastern time — when the rocket ship built by his company, SpaceX, lifted off gracefully in a nighttime launching and arced off in a streak of light amid loud applause.
“Falcon flew perfectly!!” Mr. Musk posted exultantly on Twitter from his iPhone at 4:04 a.m. “Dragon in orbit, comm locked and solar arrays active!! Feels like a giant weight just came off my back :)”
If all goes as planned, his unmanned Dragon capsule, lifted into orbit by his Falcon 9 rocket, will berth at the International Space Station on Friday bearing a modest cargo: 162 meal packets (45 of them low-sodium), a laptop computer, a change of clothes for the station astronauts and 15 student experiments.
Continue reading the main storyFar more important than the supplies is the proof of concept. Mr. Musk is trying to show the world that a determined entrepreneur can start a rocket company from scratch and, a decade later, end up doing a job that has until now been the exclusive province of federal governments.
“Every launch into space is a thrilling event,” John P. Holdren, President Obama’s assistant for science and technology, said in a statement. “But this one is especially exciting because it represents the potential of a new era in American spaceflight.”
It is the latest achievement by Mr. Musk, a cocky businessman who was born in South Africa and is one month shy of his 41st birthday. Best known for helping found PayPal and selling it to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, he currently multitasks by running two companies he founded: SpaceX, officially known as the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, and Tesla Motors, which in 2008 brought to market a head-turning all-electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster. He is also chairman of SolarCity, a company that designs and installs solar energy systems.
SpaceX is based in Hawthorne, Calif., a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport, and Tesla is in Palo Alto in Northern California, but Mr. Musk runs both hands-on. He shuttles up and down the state, spending a few days a week at each. Early Saturday morning, he was in SpaceX’s mission control for the first launching attempt of the Falcon 9 when the computers called a last-second abort, shutting down engines that had already ignited.
Two days later, he was crowing about a victory for Tesla’s new all-electric sedan.
“Major Tesla milestone,” he wrote on Twitter on Monday. “All crash testing is complete for 5* (max) safety rating. Cars can now be built for sale to public!”
On Tuesday, the Falcon 9 launched, putting Mr. Musk at the center of NASA’s ambitious effort to turn over basic transportation to low-Earth orbit to private companies. On the same day, Tesla put out a news release announcing that customer deliveries of its electric sedan, the Model S, would begin on June 22 — ahead of schedule.
The Model S “represents Tesla’s transition to a mass-production automaker and the most compelling car company of the 21st century,” Mr. Musk is quoted as saying, sparing no modesty.
(His characteristic confidence was also on view on Sunday night, when he told his 38,000 followers on Twitter that the abort on Saturday was actually overcautious: “Simulations show launch ok with bad valve,” he wrote. “Still, better to stop & fix. Recalling rockets after launch is not an option.”)
The Dragon is scheduled to stay at the station until the end of the month as astronauts unpack its cargo and replace it with items to bring back to Earth. Undocking on May 31, the Dragon will splash down in the Pacific Ocean off California. With the completion of a successful demonstration, SpaceX would begin a $1.6 billion contract to fly 12 cargo missions to the space station, and it hopes to be among the companies that NASA selects to take astronauts to the station.
“We’re really at the dawn of a new era of space exploration, and one where there’s a much bigger role for commercial companies,” Mr. Musk said at a news conference after the launching Tuesday.
The moment was also an inflection point in Mr. Musk’s own career. After leaving South Africa for Canada at 17, he wound up at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned degrees in economics and physics.
In 1995, Mr. Musk went on to a graduate program in applied physics and materials science at Stanford. He stayed two days before dropping out to start Zip2, a company that developed Web sites for media companies; he and his brother sold it to Compaq in 1999.
Mr. Musk then founded X.com, which provided financial services and payment by e-mail. X.com merged with another company, Confinity, to form PayPal, and Mr. Musk built it into the primary means that eBay bidders use to pay for their purchases.
After the sale of PayPal, Mr. Musk looked for new things to do. By the standards of Internet tycoons, he was a pauper: after taxes, he had a fortune of about $170 million.
Unlike most Web entrepreneurs, however, he did not start more Internet companies. Instead he chose ventures involving complex technology and plowed almost all of his PayPal fortune into them: $100 million into SpaceX, which he founded in 2002, $50 million into Tesla and $10 million into SolarCity.
Just four years ago, SpaceX went through a near-death experience. The first three launchings of the company’s small Falcon 1 rocket failed. One more failure, Mr. Musk said, and he would have run out of money. As he went through a divorce from his first wife, with whom he has five sons, he had to borrow money from friends.
The fourth launching succeeded. Late in 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX the cargo contract. The first two Falcon 9 launchings, in 2010, also succeeded.
Early Tuesday morning, the success streak continued. As the countdown clock hit zero, the engines remained ignited. Less than 10 minutes later, the Dragon was in orbit. It then aced several other early tasks like the deployment of solar arrays and navigational sensors and the testing of GPS equipment.
“Anything could have gone wrong,” Mr. Musk said. “And everything went right, fortunately.”
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